Patrol

Panel on Pregnant Police Officers' Rights to be Held in Washington

March 16, 2010

American University Washington College of Law in Washington D.C., will hold a conference on pregnancy and policing Mar. 18. The panel will debate whether police departments must accommodate pregnant police officers under civil rights statutes and will explore the legal arguments for and against providing reasonable accommodations to pregnant police officers, as well as the policy and real-world ramifications of those decisions for both the affected women and the public-at-large.

The panelists are Colonel Deborah Campbell of the New York State Police; Karen Kruger, a partner at Funk & Bolton P.A.; Margaret Moore, the Executive Director of the National Center for Women & Policing; Gillian Thomas, a trial attorney with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and Karen Woodard, a Deputy Chief in the Employment Litigation Section of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. The panel will be moderated by William Yeomans, a fellow at the law school and former Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

The conference will take place on Thursday, March 18th from noon-2:00 p.m. at the Washington College of Law, located at 4801 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington D.C. Lunch will be provided and the event is free of charge.

A former police officer—now an elected official with the Missouri House of Representatives—wants to force any city with a population of 5,000 or fewer inhabitants, with an area of less than two square miles, to disband its police department and contract for law enforcement services with either the county police department or a larger neighboring city.